| Abstract
The Department of Defense is planning to roll out the first generation of future force communications networks and battle command systems in the next several years. Examples of these networks and systems include the US Army’s Warfighter Information Network – Tactical (WIN-T) and the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), which will feature the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) with its Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW) and Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW). These future force systems will have the ability to characterize and meter their offered traffic based on priority, while future Army communications networks will be able to process this offered traffic based upon quality of service architectures such as differentiated services and integrated services. This implementation of quality of service will allow future Army tactical communications networks to process offered traffic under congestion conditions according to Commanders policy and traffic priority. Network congestion can arise from a combination of reduced transmission performance or increased offered load, or both. Transmission performance, in turn, can be dramatically affected by the presence of interference. Frequency assignment systems and procedures in use today seek to prevent interference, and thus degraded transmission performance, by assigning transmission frequencies that reduce or eliminate the interference potential. This is usually accomplished based exclusively on interference thresholds that compare potential interfering energy with signal or internal noise thresholds. QoS-enabled networks may have a higher degree of interference “tolerance” that can be characterized not only by radio-based parameters, but also by network-based parameters such as QoS buffer sizes and speed of service. This paper describes how a QoS-enabled network might tolerate higher interference thresholds and thus enable tighter frequency reuse. It also offers suggestions for additional areas of study related to this subject.
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| Gregory C. Wagner
Mr. Wagner received a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1984 from West Virginia University, a Masters Degree in Engineering Administration from the George Washington University, a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, and Ph. D. in Management Information Systems from the Kennedy Western University. Mr. Wagner has over 20 years of practical experience in tactical communications and spectrum management, in both the systems and software engineering disciples. He has served as software developer, system engineer, and software manager on several major Army and Joint Tactical communications software system developments. He has written several papers and articles on the topics of network operations and frequency management. He is currently supporting the US Army’s PM WIN-T in the area of Network Operations and Spectrum Management.
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